In his first few weeks as Communist Party majordomo, Xi Jinping has made clear he is targeting corrupt officials. He hasn’t quite gone as far as Teddy Roosevelt did in 1900, when he said, “No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community.” But Mr. Xi’s expressed sentiments aren’t far from that.

There’s another reason Mr. Xi may want to take a look at Teddy Roosevelt for inspiration. The U.S. in Mr. Roosevelt’s time was a wildly corrupt place, which straightened later as incomes rose and citizens demanded cleaner government. According to George Mason University economist Carlos Ramirez, China may be on a similar path – and in fact may be roughly as corrupt now as the U.S. was at an equivalent state of development

Quantifying corruption is tough to do. Prof. Ramirez tries by running a computer search of the keywords “corruption” and either “U.S. government” or “Congress” in the Atlanta Constitution, Chicago Tribune, New York Times and Washington Post from 1870 to 1930, and the Los Angeles Times from 1881 to 1930, and seeing how many articles were spit out. (He says he didn’t include The Wall Street Journal because its issues weren’t available from the earliest period.)

Advertisement

He finds a big spike in political corruption in the early 1870s during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, which also saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. There’s another, though smaller, spike in the 1920s as the Teapot Dome bribery scandal involving leases for oil- rich lands dominated the news, as did stories about Prohibition-era crime.

Getty Images

U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt

Next he turns to China and does a search of the same newspapers from 1990 to 2011 using similar terms – “corruption” and either “China” or “Chinese corruption.”He finds relatively few reported cases in 1990 and a lot more over the following years. “This increase is consistent with the general perception among many scholars that the corruption situation in China has worsened over the last two decades,” he writes.

So how does the China compare with the U.S.? He looks at both countries when they were at similar levels of development as measured by per-capita income (in 2005 dollars; adjusted for inflation and differences in prices between the two nations).

When both countries were at a $2,800 per-capita income level — 1996 in China, early 1870s in the U.S. – newspaper-reported corruption was 7 to 9 times worse in the U.S. By the time, the two countries reached $7,500 per-capita income – 2009 in China; 1928 in the U.S.—the reported corruption was roughly similar in both countries. The significance, Mr. Ramirez, concludes, is that “while corruption in China is an issue that merits attention, it is not at alarmingly high levels, compared to the U.S. historical experience.”

Prof. Ramirez acknowledges that U.S. newspapers may not report as many incidences of corruption in China – particularly as foreign news staffs shrink – as they did in the past about domestic corruption. He tries to account for those discrepancies through statistical techniques and by comparing some outcomes with Transparency International’s corruption index. He also notes that U.S. newspapers pick up wire services accounts from around the world that report on China. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, who was one of the first to use computer searches of newspaper articles to do economic analysis of corruption, says Mr. Ramirez appears to have been careful in his methodology and calls the findings “interesting.”

There’s more good news for China – Mr. Xi, are you listening? Mr. Ramirez argues that there is a “life-cycle” theory of corruption. Corruption rises in the early stages of development and then declines as a country reaches advanced-economy status. That’s roughly born out by Transparency International’s corruption rankings, where the worst grifters are, overwhelmingly, poor nations. China ranks number 80 on TI’s latest list of “perceived corruption.” That’s almost precisely in the middle of the pack, perhaps fitting for a middle-income country like China.

About China Real Time Report

China Real Time Report is a vital resource for an expanding global community trying to keep up with a country changing minute by minute. The site offers quick insight and sharp analysis from the wide network of Dow Jones reporters across Greater China, including Dow Jones Newswires’ specialists and The Wall Street Journal’s award-winning team. It also draws on the insights of commentators close to the hot topic of the day in law, policy, economics and culture. Its editors can be reached at chinarealtime@wsj.com.